Meta

Robert J. Sawyer‘s novel Watch, the second volume of his WWW Trilogy, won the Aurora Award today — Canada’s top honour in science fiction and fantasy — for Best Novel of the Year. The award was presented at the 31st annual Canadian National Science Fiction Convention, SFContario 2, in Toronto. The vote ranking:

Watch is published in Canada by Penguin Group (Canada). The US edition, under the title WWW: Watch, is from Ace Science Fiction, and the British edition is from Orion.

Earlier this year, Watch won the Hal Clement Award for Best Young-Adult Science Fiction Novel of the Year, presented at the World Science Fiction Convention in Reno.

Watch continues the interwoven coming-of-age stories begun in Wake of formerly blind math genius Caitlin Decter, chimpanzee-bonobo hybrid Hobo, and Webmind, a consciousness that has spontaneously emerged on the World Wide Web. Last year, Wake, the first volume of the WWW trilogy, also won the Aurora Award for Best Novel of the Year.

Of Watch, Analog Science Fiction and Fact — the world’s top-selling English-language science-fiction magazine — says, “Sawyer leads the reader through questions of the nature of consciousness, identity, privacy, morality, and empathy across the gulfs that separate intelligent beings from one another. The book is chock-full of ideas that will stay with you long after you finish the last page. This is science fiction at its best.”

For the first time ever, this year the Best Novel Aurora Award carried a cash prize. The $500 prize was bestowed by SF Canada, the national association of Canadian science fiction and fantasy writers.

The complete list of Aurora Award winners this year:

Best Novel: Watch by Robert J. Sawyer (Penguin Canada)

Best Short Form: “The Burden of Fire” by Hayden Trenholm (Neo-Opsis #19)

Best Poem/Song: “The ABCs of the End of the World” by Carolyn Clink (A Verdant Green) [Clink is Sawyer’s wife]

Best Graphic Novel: Goblins by Tarol Hunt

Best Related Work: The Dragon and the Stars, edited by Derwin Mak and Eric Choi (DAW)

A complete list of previous Aurora Award winners in the fiction categories can be found here. This was Sawyer’s twelfth Aurora Award win (he is the all-time record holder for this award), and his forty-sixth award win overall. His other award wins include the World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Award for Best Novel of the Year (for Hominids), the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award for Best Novel of the Year (for The Terminal Experiment), and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award — the top juried award in the science-fiction field — for Best Novel of the Year (for Mindscan).